Check the requirements

Check that your server meets all requirements for 3.1 in Administration > Site administration > Server > Environment. Please note that if you use MySQL you must upgrade the engine to InnoDB since it has become a requirement in Moodle 3.1. See Migration from MyISAM to InnoDB.

Note 1: The Assignment activity can now convert various office document formats to PDF to work with PDF annotations. This is optional - but it requires "unoconv" to be installed and configured on the server. See Unoconv installation.

Note 2: You can only upgrade to Moodle 3.1 from Moodle 2.7 or later. If upgrading from earlier versions, you must upgrade to 2.7 as a first step.

Before upgrading

We advise that you test the upgrade first on a COPY of your production site, to make sure it works as you expect.

Check for plugin updates

If you have Automatic updates deployment enabled, you will be able to update installed plugins automatically during the upgrade. Just make sure you check for available updates (via the button for it) at the Plugins check screen.

If you are updating plugins manually, it is a good moment now to check in the Moodle Plugins directory whether there is a 3.1 version available for any plugins (including themes) that you have previously installed on your site. If so, download the plugin package. In the next step, you will copy it to the appropriate location in your Moodle code (see Installing plugins).

The upgrade of the plugin will then happen as part of the Moodle upgrade process.

If an out-of-date plugin causes your upgrade to fail, you can usually delete the plugin code rather than uninstalling it from within Moodle so that the data associated with it is not deleted.

Put your site into maintenance mode

Before you begin upgrading your site, you should put it into maintenance mode to stop any non-admin users from logging in. Then you should wait for any currently running cron processes to complete before proceeding.

Install the new Moodle software

Standard install package

Move your old Moodle software program files to another location. Do NOT copy new files over the old files.

Unzip or unpack the upgrade file so that all the new Moodle software program files are in the location the old files used to be in on the server. Moodle will adjust SQL and moodledata if it needs to in the upgrade.

As mentioned above, if you had installed any plugins on your site you should add them to the new code tree (Moodle directory structure) now. It is important to check that you get the correct version for your new version of Moodle. Be particularly careful that you do not overwrite any code in the new version of Moodle and that you place the plugin folders in the correct directory (the same directory that they are in in the current installation.)

Your moodledata folder should be located separately to your Moodle code folder and, as such, should not need anything done to it. Moodle 3.0 will throw a warning if it is located in a web accessible folder and the moodledata should never be located in the Moodle code folder. If you are moving your installation to a new server or new location on your server, then you will need to follow the Migration documents.

Linux

mv moodle moodle.backup
tar xvzf moodle-3.1.tgz

Next, copy across your config.php, any custom plugins, and your .htaccess file if you created one (check that custom plugins are the correct version for your new Moodle first):

If you use cron, take care that cron.php is executeable and uses the correct php command:

chmod 740 admin/cli/cron.php (some configurations need chmod 750 or chmod 755)
copy the first line from cron.php (if it looks like '#!/usr/local/bin/php' or '#!/usr/local/bin/php5.3', no need to copy '<?php')

if necessary. However, for a simple upgrade, there should be no need to change anything with cron.

Using Git

Command line upgrade

On Linux servers, Moodle 3.1 supports running the upgrade from the command line, rather than through a web browser. This is likely to be more reliable, particularly for large sites.

Finishing the upgrade

The last step is to trigger the upgrade processes within Moodle.

If you put your site into Maintenance mode earlier; take it out now!

To do this just go to Administration > Site administration > Notifications.

Moodle will automatically detect the new version and perform all the SQL database or file system upgrades that are necessary. If there is anything it can't do itself (very rare) then you will see messages telling you what you need to do.

Assuming all goes well (no error messages) then you can start using your new version of Moodle and enjoy the new features!

Note: If you are running multiple servers then you should purge all caches manually (via Administration > Site administration > Development > Purge all caches) after completing the upgrade on all servers.

Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded...

If your server uses a main language other than English, you may encounter a 'Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded' when you try to upgrade it. You can increase max_execution_time = 160 on php.ini to allow the scripts enough time to process the language update. Otherwise, you can switch to English as the default language before doing the upgrade and back to your original language after a succcessful upgrade. See the forum discussion at https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=119598.

After upgrading

The config.php file from your installation should work fine but if you take a look at config-dist.php that came with Moodle 3.0 there are more/different options available (e.g. database drivers and settings). It's a good idea to map your old config.php settings to a new one based on the 3.0 config-dist.php.

Cron

Cron has received a major update (MDL-25499) and now has support for both scheduled and ad hoc tasks.

The benefits of these changes are:

The schedule for every task can be configured by the admin

Tasks can run in parallel

Cron processes use locking to prevent the same task running at the same time by different processes

Clusters with multiple identical application nodes are supported, you can run cron on all of them

A result of this is that cron can be run much more often, which means (for example) forum posts can be sent out sooner. To take advantage of the new cron system it is now strongly recommended that administrators increase the frequency that cron is run to at least once per minute.

You also may need to modify any automated scripts you have that are parsing the output from cron. It is no longer possible to simply monitor the output of cron for the string "Cron script completed correctly" (if that is what you were doing). An alternative is to monitor the output for the string "task failed:". If you detect that a task is failing, here are some tips for debugging the failure.

Before the upgrade to 3.1, there may have been a cron task that was failing, which was preventing the rest of cron from being executed. A failure in any single task will no longer prevent the rest of the Moodle cron tasks from executing, so you may uncover previously masked bugs. It is a good idea to closely monitor the output from cron after the upgrade to 3.1.

Assignments

The old assignment (2.2) module has been removed from core and has been replaced by a stub to support transparently remapping URLs and restoring course backups from the old module to the new one.

If you are still using the old assignment (2.2) module, after upgrading to Moodle 3.0 all assignment (2.2) activities will be hidden. You need to run the Assignment upgrade tool to un-hide the activities.

Possible issues that may affect you in Moodle 3.1

Assignment submission annotation

The Assignment activity can now convert various office document formats to PDF to work with PDF annotations. This is optional - but it requires "unoconv" to be installed and configured on the server. See the Unoconv installation.

Competencies

The new 3.1 feature, Competencies, is enabled by default. It may be disabled by an administrator in Site administration > Competencies.

PHP 5.6 bug

Please note that PHP 5.6 has an upstream bug resulting in some functionality involving AJAX requests to fail on some platforms. It does not affect PHP 5.5 or 7. You need to add always_populate_raw_post_data=-1 to your php.ini. Please refer to documentation.

PHP extension xmlreader requirement

As listed on the Environment page, the PHP extension xmlreader is required (in 3.1 onwards) in order for the downloading of csv, ods, excel etc files in reports and exports to stream progressively.

MySQL full unicode support

In fresh installs of Moodle 3.1.5, MySQL and MariaDB drivers support full UTF-8. For sites upgrading to 3.1.5, a CLI script may be used to convert to full UTF-8. See MySQL full unicode support for details.